A partial order approach to noisy fitness functions

If the fitness values are perturbed by noise then they do not have a definitive total order. As a consequence, traditional selection procedures in evolutionary algorithms may lead to obscure solutions. A potential remedy is as follows: Construct a partial order on the set of noisy fitness values and apply those evolutionary algorithms that have been designed for finding the minimal elements of partially ordered sets. These minimal elements are the only reasonable candidates for the unperturbed true solution. A method for reducing the number of candidate solutions is suggested. From a theoretical point of view it is worth mentioning that all convergence results for evolutionary algorithms with partially ordered fitness sets remain valid for the approach considered here